How To: Deleting Level 80 Toons

02Jun

A subject that I get endless laughter out of on Twitter or in Vent is the deletion of level 80 toons. I’ve deleted two level 80 characters so far, and I have no doubt that there will be others in my future as well. Deleting characters has never bothered me because, as I’ve stated several times before, I play to level. Once a character hits the level cap the game doesn’t “start” for me, it ends. I don’t care about gearing them up, doing dailies for gold, building my rep, collecting mounts and tabards, or anything else that people do at level 80.

One way you can look at it is that the Experience bar on my toons is a representation of my personal Enjoyment bar. The more it moves, the more fun I have. Once I ding and that bar resets I’ve got a whole new bar full of fun to go play around with. But once that bar stops moving, so too does my enjoyment with that character. Now, I do have an exception to that which is raiding with my guild, but I only do that on one of my toons. Right now that one toon happens to be my Mage, but he may very well get replaced with a healer before too long.

So now that you’ve got the backstory that nobody asked for let’s get down to business; shall we?

Deleting max leveled toons is something that makes most players cringe. They just can’t stand the thought of throwing away all that time and effort that it took. For me of course, it’s just another day and another toon.

Steps For Deletion
When you delete a high level toon for the sake of deleting them rather than for something like closing your account and rage quitting or whatever.

Check the Auction House: A lot of players do all of their AH business on a single toon, which is my preferred method. If that’s the case with you then you can skip this step unless (obviously) this is the toon that you do it on. The first thing you want to check is whether or not you have any gold coming in from sells. If so then you know you need to wait to delete until after you get the gold for those items. If a bid was placed then you’ll need to wait for one hour after the auction time, where a buy out will come in approximately one hour after it was purchased. For all other items you have on there you want to just cancel the auctions so that you can get the items back and then send them to another toon to sell or just vendor them.

Clear Out Your Bank: First thing’s first, you need to send all your valuable goods to another toon, preferably your bank alt or your main character, or something along those lines. If you send items in the mail then you can immediately delete the toon and still get the items in the mail, but if you put something on the AH with them then you lose any items or gold from selling them. If there are Soulbound items in there then you should vendor them all or delete them if they cannot be sold.

Everything else should be sent to another character. If you have crafting mats for that toon then you may want to take one last run through your profession to make whatever might be more profitable crafted than as raw mats. If you have any items in your bags or bank that are for quests that you can’t immediately turn in, then delete them.

Spending Currency: The first thing you want to do is take advantage of all your currency. That means raid/heroic emblems, stonekeeper shards, honor points, etc – basically everything except for your gold. Spend it either on things that you can sell or things that can benefit your other characters. In my case I spent my emblems of Frost/Triumph on Crusader Orbs that I sent to my bank alt to sell on the AH. My Stonekeeper’s Shards and Wintergrasp Marks were turned into Wintergrasp Commendations which bind to your account and grant 2,000 Honor when used.

I used the honor tokens to bump Psynister’s honor to get close to a multiple of 10,000 and then ran one quick battleground for enough honor kills to get the last 250’some honor to bump me over the 10k mark (50k in his case) rather than spend one of the commendations for 2k and then not use 1,750 of it. The honor points were then used to purchase epic gems from the vendor in Stormwind which I sent as raw gems rather than cutting them myself before I deleted him.

Also, since Psynister was a 450 Jewelcrafter I did his daily JC quest and turned the token in for a Dragon’s Eye that I also sent to have auctioned since the gems you cut from it all bind on pickup. The final currency he had available to him was the gold itself which I did not spend since it can be spent by any toon.

Selling Your Gear: Deleting a character with all their gear on is like throwing away gold, so be sure to find yourself a vendor and sell everything you’re wearing that’s not transferable to another toon (such as BoA Heirlooms). The whole point here is to not waste resources. You might be deleting the character and thus “wasting” the time and effort put into the character, but for me I got paid back for that with entertainment and the rest is just icing.

Mail Your Spoils: Finally you need to send everything you’ve got left to another character. I personally use my main character as my AH character and have my bank alt simply hold things for me so that I’m not bothered with logging into them all the time. Send everything that you kept from your bank/bags and everything that you got from cancelling auctions and so on, but don’t send your gold just yet.

Sell Your Bags: We’re here to milk it for everything it’s worth so be sure to sell your bags after you’ve gotten rid of all of your other items. If your bags aren’t soulbound then you can send them in the mail as well, otherwise you’ll need to just vendor them.

Send Your Gold: And finally you need to send all of the gold that you have to your other character as well.

Walkthrough
Now that all of your resources have been spent and all your goods have been sent off to other characters to hold or dispose of, it’s time to get down to business and delete the toon. All it takes is a quick log out, click the delete button, type in the word “delete” to confirm, and then click on “Ok”. It’s as simple as that.

To give you a better idea of how it’s done I went ahead and put it into a video for you. I realize that the audio in the video is insanely low compared to what it was when I uploaded it, so something apparently went a little off during the upload or something. I might fix it, might not. Anyway, my apologies for the crappy sound.

15 responses to “How To: Deleting Level 80 Toons”

Great guide, and one that’s applicable for any character level, really. I’ve deleted characters no higher than 15 and immediately /facepalmed because I forgot to empty their bank, or send away their gold, etc. This is a nice checklist to avoid mistakes like that!

Rades, thanks. That was really the point that I was making here. I used my level 80 deletion as an example because so many people just can’t believe it. As someone who frequently deletes toons though I’m very familiar with the process of cleaning a toon out and then sending them on.
I have deleted a bank toon with over 400 active auctions and 2000g. It wasn’t international but it happened so I pay special attention to these details now.

While the Death Knight’s 450 Blacksmithing doesn’t do much for my Mage (main) other than the occasional belt buckle, his 450 Jewelcrafting came in handy every now and then. His daily JC quests earned 100g every day if I sold the Dragon’s Eyes, but we have 5 JC’s in the guild that will cut anything I need at any time; one of them being my wife.

Once I stop playing the character they might as well be gone anyway. If I stop playing them for more than a couple of months then chances are I’ll never pick them up again anyway so they just take up character slots at that point.

With Cataclysm I plan on rolling one toon of every race, doing Alliance on one new server and Horde on another. I’m going to get each of them to at least level 15 and then decide from there which characters I want to play right and which I don’t really care much for. Then I’ll delete every one of them and reroll them as actual characters on my main server at which time I’ll likely delete almost all of the toons I have over there. I’m going to keep my Mage (for now), and most likely my Druid, but everything from the 72 Warlock down to the 7 Warrior may very well end up in the deleted files.

Wow, if I could have been as clear headed as this about deleting my level 80s some of my evenings would have been markedly less dramatic :)

I think we delete for differing reasons though, mine have been (oh the shame) ridiculous emo deletions (tragic indeed for a woman in her 30s) most of which have required much grovelling to a GM at a later date. But yes, with low level alts I have often forgot to vendor everything, oftentimes it’s the bags which vanish into the Nether with the character…

I think if I were deleting a character for negative reasons then I might not be so detailed about it. I’ve done enough deleting that I’m sure I’d remember most of these things. If there was one thing I’d forget it would probably be to spend the non-gold currency. If I was totally upset or emotional then I might do little more than send over the gold (if that) and just delete the toon as is.